Two days after Elisa and Sarah returned to Sacramento and the law office, an old acquaintance of Larry’s motored down from Reno at Elisa’s invitation. This was Ed Horn, another Reno lawyer, who had known Larry since the late 1970s. Elisa told him that Larry had left, and that a lawyer’s services were urgently needed by McNabney and Associates. Since Horn had previously taken some of Larry’s spillover cases while the office was still in Reno, he saw no harm in answering the summons. Elisa told him she needed him to take a deposition from a doctor in a car accident claim, and that she’d pay him a reasonable fee for his time.

On Tuesday, September 18, Horn took the deposition of a doctor in the car wreck case. Horn thought it went well, especially when the insurance carrier offered to settle the whole thing for $150,000. Elisa, who was present at the deposition, told Horn that the clients would accept that amount of money to square their claim—that she had their authorization to settle the case. Hands were shaken all around, and the representative from the insurance company said the checks would be mailed shortly. Horn’s fee for a morning’s work was to be half of McNabney and Associates’ 8½ percent of the take. The rest of the one-third or so legal fee was supposed to go to another Sacramento lawyer who had previously represented the client, a man named Michael Carter. When the insurance company agreed to settle, that meant Horn’s fee was $6,200—not bad for a morning’s work, except that it would later be said by other legal experts that the case was probably worth as much as half a million dollars. Even Larry, in an arbitration meeting late in August, had said the case was worth a minimum of $300,000.

After the deposition, Horn went with Elisa and Sarah back to the Woodbridge house. Exactly why he did this wasn’t clear later; investigating police believed that Horn had a romantic interest in Elisa. Horn said that nothing intimate transpired, that he was only agreeing to handle several more cases for McNabney and Associates, as he had in the past. Horn said Elisa told him that Larry had gone off to join a cult. Horn didn’t question this, apparently—he knew Larry’s reputation for impulsive behavior.

After spending the night at the Woodbridge house, Horn returned to Reno the following day, carrying the files on four other McNabney and Associates cases. Then he waited for a check to arrive for his part of the fees.

On September 25, the insurance company in the Carter case issued three separate checks, payable to Carter and McNabney and Associates, for $50,000, $99,000, and $950. The two large checks were deposited into the first client trust account shortly after they were received; the third check seems to have vanished.

By that time, however, Elisa and Sarah had mastered the arcana of moving money between accounts by forging Larry’s name, and by telephone transfer. The money went into the whirligig of the various McNabney accounts, and eventually back out again in the form of checks to Elisa, Sarah, Ginger Miller, various credit card companies, rent on the apartment for Haylei, and a couple of car dealers. Two used BMWs were purchased, including one for $18,277, which replaced the one that had been repossessed from Sarah by the Texas dealer. Some of the checks were made out to Larry McNabney and signed by Larry McNabney. The bank turned them into cash, no questions asked.

By the end of October, in fact, all but $593 of the trust account had been spent—none of it going to Michael Carter, who had now been victimized twice, once in a car wreck and then later by his own attorney.

As September turned into October, Elisa and Sarah continued to haunt the horse show circuit, traveling with Greg Whalen to shows near Elk Grove, California; Portland, Oregon; Lancaster, California; and Snohomish, Washington. From the day of Larry’s disappearance, Elisa had been eager to sell Justa Lotta Page. Greg continued to lease a gelding to Elisa for her to show. Wherever they went, though, they were followed by whispered gossip—rumors about Larry’s sudden disappearance, and also, about Greg and Elisa.

At the Lancaster show, in fact, someone saw Greg and Elisa locked in what appeared to be a passionate embrace in one of the horse stalls. The witness had no idea who they were, but was impressed by the fervor displayed. “Boy,” she said, “those people should get a motel room.” That was when she was told that the smoochers were Elisa and Greg, and that there was a wild story going around that Larry might have been murdered by his wife.

The origin of these stories among the horse set seems to have stemmed from Elisa’s question to Debbie Kail about whether “ace” would kill someone. Overheard by someone on the day the conversation took place, the remarks began to assume potential significance after Larry’s sudden disappearance. Elisa and Greg seemed oblivious to any of the rumors, however.

Throughout much of the first few weeks of October, Elisa frequently called the Whalen Ranch. Greg later said these calls were made because Elisa was anxious to sell Justa Lotta Page to raise more cash. “She put quite a bit of pressure on us to sell it in a hurry,” Whalen said later. “And so she was calling a lot.… She called in the morning, she’d call at night. She’d call my wife. She’d call Debbie. She said with Larry gone, she couldn’t afford to have this horse there with us anymore, and she needed to sell it. And it was a stud besides, so it wasn’t an easy horse to sell, because you’re only going to sell a stud to somebody who needs one.”

Eventually, however, a buyer was found: Maynard Alves, like Greg Whalen, another horse rancher. Alves had a stud ranch near Redmond, Oregon.

“I’m a friend of Greg’s,” Maynard said later. “I’ve known him since I was a kid. I heard through a friend of a friend about a lady who wanted to sell some horses, because her husband had joined a cult. I went to Clements, looked at the horse, thought he was a good horse, and I bought him.”

Alves already had one stud on his Oregon ranch, but guessed another couldn’t hurt. He and his wife joined Greg, Mary and Elisa for dinner in Clements. Then Maynard brought out his checkbook. “It’s nobody’s business,” Maynard said, when he was asked how much he paid. “I can tell you this, it wasn’t a gift.”

Later, though, Greg would say that Justa Lotta Page brought around $15,000 in cash—“plus trade.” While Greg didn’t clarify what he meant by his amendment, it appears that Elisa and Larry may have owed Greg as much as $40,000 in unpaid horse expenses at the time the stallion was transferred to Alves; later it would be rumored in the horse show circuit that Greg and the Kails had taken a half-ownership position in Justa Lotta Page with Maynard. Although Greg would later say that Justa Lotta Page had been moved from his ranch to Alves’ place, in fact the horse was kept at the Whalen Ranch for almost seven months after the transfer. Greg showed the horse until May of 2002, at ten more shows, including the World Championship show in Oklahoma City in November. After that, Alves took physical possession of the horse, and began showing him himself.

While Alves wouldn’t say how much he’d paid for Justa Lotta Page, it does appear that he was dealing in distressed property. Elisa needed to sell the horse, and was hardly in a position to hold out for top dollar—not if Greg was going to get his money. If one adds the rumored $40,000 owed by Elisa (“trade”) to the $15,000 paid by Alves, the resulting $55,000 sales figure seems closer to the McNabneys’ equity in Justa Lotta Page at the time. But as Maynard Alves later pointed out, buying a stallion was a gamble: whether it was a gamble that paid off depended on Justa Lotta Page’s own offspring. “If he turns out to be a dud, I may cut his throat,” Alves joked.

The day before the horse was transferred to Maynard Alves—Whalen said the title could be assigned by Elisa, as Larry’s wife, without the need for his signature—Elisa, Sarah and Haylei drove to a Sacramento Jaguar dealer. Elisa had her heart set on a brand new, carnival red XK8 convertible. The price of the car was $68,148. Salesman Richard Wiedel talked to Elisa, and learned that while she wanted to lease the new car, she didn’t want it in her name, but rather in Sarah’s.

“Elisa and Sarah and Elisa’s daughter arrived,” Wiedel recalled, “and the car they eventually leased was sitting on a porch area. After they looked it over, and were excited about it, Elisa made the statement that they wanted to lease the car on a two-year basis, and pre-pay it. So it was—I mean, that’s a very straightforward and simple transaction … Elisa was definitely the leader and the decision-maker, absolutely.”

Elisa told Wiedel that Sarah would guarantee the two years of the lease with a check from Larry McNabney and Associates. The arrangements would be made to wire-transfer the money directly from the law firm’s bank account to the dealership, at which point the dealership would give the check back to Sarah. This didn’t make any difference to Wiedel—how the customers paid for the wheels was their problem, not his. Sarah went into a back room with the dealership’s finance manager, produced a check written on the second business account for $30,000, signed with Larry McNabney’s signature, and began to fill out the paperwork. The dealership called the bank and verified that there was a sufficient amount of money in the account to back up the check. Then Elisa and Haylei drove away in the red Jag, followed a few minutes later by Sarah in her BMW. The next day, the money was wired from the bank to the dealership, and on the same day someone from the law firm returned to the dealership and reclaimed the check.

At Clements that night, having dinner with the Whalens and the Alveses, Elisa told everyone that the shiny new red car was her “divorce settlement from Larry.”

After the Lancaster show, the rumors among the horse set that Greg and Elisa were having an affair gained much wider circulation. Greg said he heard the rumors, but “that stuff with Elisa never bothered me and it never bothered my wife. We both knew it wasn’t true.”

But the rumors would continue, and take on even greater spice and frequency at the AQHA World Championship show at Oklahoma City in November.

The plan had been for Elisa and Sarah to travel with Greg and the Kails to Oklahoma City for the big show, which was scheduled to begin the first week of November, and last about two weeks. But Elisa called the ranch around the end of the month and told them that there had been an accident, that she and Sarah wouldn’t be traveling with them after all. Instead, Elisa said, she and Sarah would meet Whalen and the Kails in Oklahoma City.

By this point, Debbie Kail had heard the rumors surrounding Elisa and her father, and her friendship with Elisa was cooling rapidly. She was also increasingly puzzled by Larry’s disappearance, particularly because Elisa kept providing so many different explanations for what had happened to him. After the first “cult” story, Debbie had asked if Larry had gone “back to the cult in Washington State”—the one he had previously told Whalen and the Kails about. Elisa said no, it was a different cult—a cult in Florida. Then Debbie heard that Elisa had told other people among the horse show set that Larry had gone to a cult in Costa Rica … that he was in Minneapolis when the World Trade Center was hit … that he was in rehab … that he was hiding out from drug dealers … the story seemed to change depending on who Elisa was talking to.

At one point Debbie decided to try to talk to Larry himself. She called his cellular phone and left a message. No one ever called her back.

By late October, Elisa had told her that Larry was divorcing her—in Florida, of all places. Elisa told Debbie she didn’t care—she had a new boyfriend, another trainer, not Greg, as it turned out, but someone from Washington State. It was fairly common knowledge in the horse set that Elisa had given the Washington man a gold Rolex watch.

Overall, Debbie had the impression that Elisa and Sarah were using the horse shows to meet men. Elisa was dressing younger, more provocatively. She had begun to lose weight and lighten her hair color—it was as if she were trying to close the gap in age between her and Sarah.

Then came the World Championship show in Oklahoma City, and by the time that was over, relations between Debbie and Elisa would be thoroughly ruptured.